


Guilt is for the Sinners

by MissAlise



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: (I swear), Angst, But in the meantime Stiles is an idiot., Canon-Typical Violence, Derek secretly wants everyone to be happy, Gen, Guilty!Stiles, Happy Ending, M/M, Magic, Self-Sacrifice, Stiles makes a terrible werewolf
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-29
Updated: 2013-05-29
Packaged: 2017-12-13 09:39:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/822824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissAlise/pseuds/MissAlise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles knows--has always known--that it's his fault Scott was out there that night.  It's his fault Scott got bitten, his fault that his best friend can't have the normal life he's always wanted, and the worst part is that there's nothing he can do to change it.</p><p>Until, one day, there is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: I was in a terrible mood all day--then I realized that it was my own story making me depressed. Oh, Lord. Happy ending, I promise!

_“How blunt are all the arrows of thy quiver in comparison with those of guilt.”_

-Robert Blair

  


See...here’s the thing: everyone’s guilty of something.  Whether it’s scraping the side of the car against a pylon at the gas station, or cheating on an exam, or lying to a boss at work.  Everyone has things they think about at night, things they wish they hadn’t done, and I get that.  It’s not rocket science--it’s basic human psychology.  The big difference, obviously, is that not everyone has to carry around the guilt of ruining their best friend’s life, but everyone has _something_.

I’m also not an idiot.  I know that there’s a more direct line of responsibility here.  None of this would have happened if Peter Hale (that asshole) hadn’t decided on assaulting an asthmatic high-school Sophomore in the forest, but the next guy down the list is definitely me.  If I hadn’t brought Scott out there in the middle of the night, if I hadn’t left him behind when my dad found us, if it had been me standing in that clearing instead of my God damn unlucky-as-shit best friend...it would have been ok.  Not 100% ok, but ok enough to deal with.  Ok enough to get over.  After everything I’ve seen Scott go through, you couldn’t _pay_ me to become a werewolf, but let’s be honest with ourselves: from the moment I figured out what he was, if I could have taken that burden away from him, I’d have done it in a heartbeat.  Half a heartbeat.

But I couldn't. 

So, instead of taking away his pain, I did everything I could to help him get through it.  I made sure he could keep playing lacrosse (Although, come on Scott.  I can’t take your exams for you.) and I covered for him when he needed me to.  I got so good at lying to my father that sometimes the lies popped out of my mouth without me even thinking about them.  That kernel of guilt never went away, and the sting of it never failed to remind me that my best friend wouldn’t even need help if it weren’t for me, but I guess I figured out ways of dealing  with it, over the years.

The letter was there on my bedside table, calling out to me like it didn’t care that I was trying to ignore it.  The thought that my father had gone behind my back warred with the thought that he loved me enough to go to bat for me even when I couldn’t be bothered to.  Princeton had always been...you know.  My dream.  The magical place I pictured when I was ten and thought I knew exactly what going to college would be like.  Scott and I would go there together (I’d have to find a way to hack into their admissions office and give him a helping hand--even back then I knew that Scott’s grades would never be something to write home about) and we’d spend four amazing years learning everything there was to know, having an insane amount of sex with smoking-hot college chicks, and figuring our shit out.  We’d be happy.

But now I had a best friend with Lycanthropy, and an acceptance letter--courtesy of my father who, despite everything, just loved me too much to watch me throw my future away--burning a metaphorical hole in my furniture, and I knew Scott didn’t have an answering one on his.  He’d be lucky if they even let him graduate at the end of the year, and there’d be nothing but community college waiting for him if they did.  It was a choice between my future and Scott’s future, and when it came down to it, that wasn’t really much of a choice.  Like I said, he wouldn’t even need help if it weren’t for me.  The thought of something happening to him while I was gone (getting shot with a poisoned bullet, dying on the side of the road somewhere because he was too stubborn to join Derek’s pack and his own pack had left him for delusions of college grandeur) wasn’t bearable.  Even teasing around its edges felt too much like my heart getting burned.

I flipped over onto my side and gently flicked the letter away.  It slid off the side of the table and into the trash-can beside it with a finality that I appreciated, so I pulled the comforter up over my shoulders and closed my eyes.  Tomorrow was a big day, afterall, and big days demanded plenty of beauty sleep.

The howl split the night just as my mind was walking that line between sleep and wakefulness--a wild-sounding howl, filled with loneliness and too many other things to decipher--and I took a moment to lament the sad fact that I’d been around the Beacon Hills werewolves for so long that I could even tell their damn howls apart.  Well, I thought (maybe a little bit spitefully), at least I wasn’t the only one curled up and licking my wounds that night.

oOOo


	2. The Book

_“Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away.”_  
-Andrew Boyd

“It’s nothing, man.  Seriously.  Let it go.”  Scott was slumped down next to me, rotating his lacrosse stick idly in his hands, looking at me like he could force me to give in with nothing more than the power of his mind.  First game of the season, and Scott was still benched because of his delightful grades.  If he’d spent any of his time with Allison actually studying, he’d probably have been fine, but we both knew that was never going to happen.

“I know something’s bothering you, Stiles.  Cough it up.  Best friend, remember?  I have rights.”

“Ok, you got me--I ran out of toothpaste this morning and I’m worried that your wolf-smell is picking up my atrocious breath.”

“Dude.  I don’t need to be a werewolf to smell that.”

Scott snorted, nudging my shoulder gently with his.  It had taken him a while (and a lot of bruises on my end) to really wrap his mind around the fact that he wasn’t human anymore, but he eventually figured it out.  There’s a lot of baggage that comes with the shape-shifting thing (superhuman strength included) that made Scott’s interactions with us mere mortals a lot more difficult than before.  I never minded--even in the beginning, when Scott hadn’t figured out how to control it yet, I was never scared of him--but I was glad once he finally learned how to avoid injuring me on a bi-weekly basis.

I’d learned some things, too.  Like how to deceive someone who can smell a lie on you a mile away.  

(Never lie.  Talk about something else.  Move the conversation in a direction that doesn’t scare you so much you feel panic nip at your throat for the first time in years.)

“Hey, I’m not the one who accidentally clawed the tube open last time I was sleeping over.  And I can’t exactly tell Dad that we need more toothpaste because my extra-hairy best friend destroyed it, can I?”

“I already said I was sorry!”

“Yeah, and your penance is sitting next to a Stiles with zombie-breath.  Deal with it.”

“See, that’s a joke, but with our lives I won’t even be surprised if there’s a huge pack of zombies living the next county over.”

“Oh God, please don’t say that.”

It’s hard to describe everything Scott meant to me, growing up.  Having someone who was there for you no matter what, even when you broke out so badly the day before eighth grade that people thought you had chicken pox...it was everything to me.  Scott was the kind of friend who would make fun of my virginity until the cows came home, but would never truly make me feel bad about it for even a single second.  He fought for me.  He fought for me when the only other person out there who would was my dad.  We fought for each other.

Unfortunately, the downside to that was that we knew right away when something was wrong.  And there were...admittedly a lot of things wrong with me my senior year.  The lack of girlfriend, the werewolf best-friend, the angry (very male) Alpha who liked to follow me around and menace me.  It’s kind of funny, because I’m pretty sure Derek thought that I had some sort of sway over Scott that I never had.  From the beginning, when Scott was desperate to play in his first-ever high-school lacrosse match, Derek thought I could make him change his mind.  And hell, maybe I could have.  Maybe I could have convinced Scott that the best course of action was to join up with Derek and Isaac, finally be part of a pack.  It might have even meant that I could leave Beacon Hills without feeling like complete shit about abandoning him.

But I never even tried.  I don’t know what that says about me.

“Stilinski!  Much as it pains me to say this, get on the field!  Greenburg’s even more pathetic than usual today,” Coach Finstock yelled from the other side of the bench, drawing both of our attentions away.

“Sure, Coach,” I replied, idly wondering why lacrosse wasn’t nearly as exciting as it used to be.

To no one’s surprise, we lost that game.  Beacon Hills hadn’t had a winning lacrosse team since the beginning of our sophomore year, when the whole season ended up going to hell in a wolf-shaped handbasket.  Jackson left the team after the whole “killing half the town” incident, despite the fact that most people who actually knew what had happened didn’t blame him for it.  I get how he felt, too--if Jackson had been stronger, had been able to fight the kanima out of his body sooner, maybe those people would still be alive.

I heard he went up north somewhere, but I’m not entirely sure.  I can’t say I was sorry to see him go, even if it left Lydia in a difficult place.  Last I heard, she shipped herself off to Amherst after graduation and hasn’t been back since, but that whole last year of high-school...her head wasn’t in it.  She wanted to leave Beacon Hills as much as I did, and, unlike me, she didn’t have anything keeping her here.

After the game (and a quick trip to the florist), I went to the cemetery.  I couldn’t blame Scott for not remembering--I kept it pretty close to the chest, to be honest--but January 2nd was my mother’s birthday.  Even back then, she’d been dead for a long time.  But I never stopped grieving.  Rationally, I knew there wasn’t anything worth visiting at Beacon Hills Cemetery.  She was long gone, if she’d ever even been there in the first place, but it was still nice.  Visiting her grave, I mean.

The ground was covered by a couple inches of snow--snow that had amplified Derek’s howl from the night before--and it crunched under my feet as I walked.  I gotta tell you, despite all the crap horror movies me and Scott have seen over the years, there’s something really peaceful about walking around in a cemetery by yourself.  Beacon Hills isn’t a big place, and the cemetery isn’t big either, soI usually had the whole place to myself.  Just one more of the many reasons why I chose to visit my mother’s grave on her birthday instead of the anniversary of her death (a lovely, sunny day in May).

“Hey, Mom...it’s Stiles.”  I never did get used to talking to a hunk of granite, but by the time I graduated high-school, my mother’s face was already disturbingly blurred in my memory.  I could draw that headstone with perfect accuracy, but I couldn’t bring up an image of my own mother.  “We had our first lacrosse game of the season today.  Big surprise, we lost.  Scott’s grades are terrible, so he probably won’t be able to play all season.  I’m not sure he cares, to be honest.  Allison’s more important to him than just about anything, these days, so getting to spend time with her is really all he cares about.”

I knelt down and rested the flowers I’d brought against her headstone.  Sunflowers, despite being a bitch to find in the middle of winter, because they were always her favorite.  ( _Danielle Stalinski, 1967-2003  Beloved Wife and Loving Mother_.)  A bouquet of red roses was already there, lightly covered in white and courtesy of my father’s morning visit.

“I guess I never really thought what it would be like when one of us started dating--I get a little jealous.  You know how it is.  Sharing...it sucks.  I guess I got used to having him all to myself.

“Dad applied to Princeton for me--that bastard.  He knows I can’t go.  I can’t leave Scott.  Yeah, alright, he’s got Allison, and she knows how to torture people with crossbows, but there’s a lot more to supporting your werewolf than torturing people with crossbows!  You get it, right Mom?  I’m not being ridiculous here, am I?”

Sometimes the ache I felt for my mother was like a hole in my chest that wouldn’t close.  Dad did his best for me, and his best was pretty damn good, but sometimes I walked past one of those fancy stores in the mall and smelled something Sandalwood and it brought the image of my mother to the forefront of my mind like magic.  I remember her holding me in her hospital bed ( _Sandalwood covered up by the stink of antiseptic and death_ ) and saying “I love you, my baby boy...you grow up to be a good man, you hear me?”

When I was little, the first few years after she’d passed away, I would dream about her saying that and then getting miraculously better.  Like somehow the power of her love for me was enough to eat away at the sickness inside of her.  Enough to get rid of it.  Enough to keep her alive so she could go on loving me.  I don’t dream it much anymore, but I still miss her.  Going to the cemetery helped, to be honest, but it never really filled in the hole.

“I mean, I probably _am_ being ridiculous, but what are you gonna do.  I’m a ridiculous guy.”  I stood up, brushing some of the gently falling snow from where it had collected on my thighs.  “I owe him, Mom.  I can’t leave Scott behind.  Not when it’s my fault he’s a wolf in the first place.  I know you’d probably tell me to go for it.  It’s my future and all that, after all, and you’re kind of contractually obligated to not give a shit about my best friend’s lycanthropy if it means me skipping out on college.  But I can’t.  He’s sick.  I have to stay here.

“Anyway,” I said, brushing the snow off the top of her stone with my coat sleeve, “I gotta go.  Dad said he’d be home around nine, and I thought I’d make him something for dinner before he got back.  I love you, Mom.”

The granite slab didn’t answer.

oOOo

I knew a bit about magic.  Not a ton.  Not enough to actually use it.  But, enough to be able to recognize that most of the junk on the internet was just new-age woo-woo crap that did nothing but give twelve-year-old girls something to do at slumber parties.  Sometimes trying to identify Beacon Hills’ monster-of-the-week led me to websites about half-assed protection spells or ways to clear a house of spirits, but it was all small-fry stuff.  Stuff that eased the caster’s mind more than anything else.

The book that was sitting on my front porch, wrapped in brown paper and shoved into a plastic bag to protect it from the snow, was not small-fry stuff.  That much was pretty damn obvious.  The spells I saw as I flipped through the pages reminded me of the few times when I’d come across the real deal--an online forum or a website written by someone who wasn’t just some hippy dabbling in homeopathics.  They reminded me of magic that was real enough to scare the shit out of me, magic that had the ability to change lives, ruin them, end them, erase them.  It went so far beyond a fence of Mountain Ash.

I should have wondered who brought it for me.  I should have thought about the damage this kind of book was capable of and the motivations for giving it away.  It’s funny, though, that no matter how smart I think I am, sometimes I’m the biggest idiot on the planet.  It took me a long time to figure out where the book came from, and even then someone had to tell me, but that first night I had it I couldn’t think about anything but the spells inside it.  

The stuff inside this book was huge.

The whole time I was making dinner for my father, my mind was on the book, tucked away where I’d hidden it underneath my bedroom mattress.  It was like that damn acceptance letter, reaching out to me like it could call me to heel.  Some of the spells I’d seen inside it shouldn’t have been possible.  But...something inside me--in that hollow place where Mom used to live--told me it was real.

It was after ten o’clock by the time we’d finished eating dinner and devoured the birthday cupcakes Dad had picked up at the store.  It had taken us a while--you know, celebrating Mom’s life instead of focusing on her death--but we’d learned how to move on without leaving her behind.  Celebrating her birthday together had turned into one of our coping mechanisms, and it was the only reason I didn’t bolt upstairs as soon as I could manage it.

“I’m gonna hit the sack.  School tomorrow and all that.  Thanks for the cupcakes.”

“You’re welcome, son.  Goodnight,” my father replied, getting up from the table and coming around the side to give me a hug.  Touching my dad was something I’d never shied away from.  He was the Sheriff, and there wasn’t a day that went by when I didn’t think about the fact that he might never come home.

“Love you, Dad,” I said into his shoulder.  Giving him one last squeeze, I let go of him and headed up to my bedroom where the book of magic was waiting for me.

It looked...old.  Not ancient, but like something that was penned in the fifties and taken pretty crappy care of in the years between.  And it didn’t look like those magic books you saw in Buffy, with the archaic writing and the celtic symbols all over the place.  The pages were a bit yellowed around the edges, but the various pen inks were pretty obviously modern, and the handwriting looked near-contemporary too.  No frills, easily legible.  It looked like a woman’s, but I couldn’t be sure.  My mom was really into handwriting-analysis when she was still alive, but I’d been too busy climbing trees and sneaking over to Scott’s to pick any of it up.  It looked like someone’s journal, to be honest, or a recipe book, but on the first page the author had written the words _White Spells_.

It was pretty clear that this wasn’t necessarily meant to be some sort of instruction manual for future generations.  A lot of the spells had notations in the margins that didn’t make any sense, and several of the pages had been spilled on or cemented together by some mysterious goop.  Every now and again, a page had been dedicated as a divider of sorts, separating the journal into sections like _Herb Index_ and _Protective Spells/Preventative Magic_.  It was all surprisingly...mundane, to be honest.  No weird spellings, no newt-eyes or boiled frog-toes.  I’d always kind of assumed the real bad-ass magic was so difficult that it would take someone with real power to manage it.  Suddenly  I’m finding out that serious spells are easy enough that anyone with an open mind and an apothecary down the street could cast them, and I didn’t like it.  I could make my dad’s dying pot of basil perk up with nothing more than a bit of ground-up hellebore and a chant.

I know--it sounds like bullshit.  It did back then, too.  But I knew it wasn’t.

It was long past midnight when turned the first page of the final section in the journal, a section entitled _Healing Magic_.  If there were any branch of magic that I could call myself “decently knowledgeable” about, it was the healing kind.  When Scott had first been bitten, I scoured whatever resource I could find for a way to cure him, and none of it worked.  I tried it all on myself, first, by slicing open my finger and willing it to seal shut again.  Every single chant, every single herb, every single incantation ended up accomplishing exactly nothing.

This was different, though.  This book understood something that none of the amateur spells did--you don’t get something for nothing.  Real magic is all about spiritual balance, the world around us being in harmony, and trying to shift that balance never came without a price.  A lot of the book’s spells called for animal sacrifices--you know, things like killing a raven (willingly offered) over a rowan-wood bowl as a remedy for “stomach-death”, whatever the hell that was.  I shudder to think what kind of stomach problem would be dire enough to warrant bird-slaughter, but since I’ve never needed to use that one, I never found out.  The last spell of the book was an incantation for transferring an injury or a sickness from one person to another.  Would my father have used it to take away my mother’s pain, if he’d known?  Would he have taken her cancer into himself?  I fell asleep with the book on my chest, and when I woke in the morning it was like someone had whispered the answer in my ear while I’d been dreaming.

I’d told my mother that Scott was sick, and now I’d finally found a way to make him better.

  
oOOo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I probably don’t have to say this, but please don’t try any of this crazy magic woo-woo at home. I can’t attest for their effect on your basil, but certain varieties of hellebore give you explosive diarrhea and AIN’T NOBODY GOT TIME FOR THAT!
> 
> All feedback/concrit is more than welcome! This is currently a WIP, but I’m thinking six chapters or thereabouts. I’m going to stick with a “T” rating for now, because I’m not sure if sexy-times are going to fit. I’ll do my damndest, though, so don’t worry. I know this seems like it’s edging on Stiles/Scott territory, but I’m not going there.


End file.
